Want to know more about who works at Get A Better Car, and the history of the company? You can find out everything you need to know here.
Duncan is the owner and creator of Get A Better Car. Before Get A Better Car, he worked for First Response Finance in Nottingham for 12 years in several roles that all focussed around helping customers with an average or bad credit score to get car finance. After a couple of years analysing the best cars to stock and the best ways to get the message out to customers, he took the leap and set up the business and hasn’t looked back since.
When he’s not at work, Duncan enjoys spending time with his small children, going to the gym, and watching football and wrestling.
Bernie has been part of the Get A Better Car team since the end of 2018 and also worked at First Response Finance with Duncan. She has around 10 years experience working there plus her experience with Get A Better Car giving her a fantastic understanding of the fair and bad credit car finance market. She works part time at Get A Better Car to give her a really good work/life balance and spend more time with her small children.
When she’s not at work, Bernie enjoys going to the gym, socialising with her friends, seeing family, and going on bike rides with her partner and their children.
Kirstie is back with us in her second spell after originally starting working for the Get A Better Car team in 2019. She picked things up very quickly and has a great attention to detail and good initiative. Her main experience before Get A Better Car was in admin and finance, which provided her all the tools needed to be able to handle the volume of finance applications that Get A Better Car receive. After returning to Get A Better Car in 2025 after 2.5 years away raising her youngest daughter, it was like she’d never been away.
When she’s not at work, Kirstie enjoys days out with the family, spending time with her children, and reading.
Maddie has been part of the Get A Better Car team since 2022 and has a very thorough approach to her work. She has developed a very comprehensive understanding of the fair and bad credit car finance market, as well as picking up a lot of understanding on how best to handle different car related issues. Her experience prior to Get A Better Car was in an accounting capacity which has helped give her the attention to detail and understanding of finance required to perform at a high level with us.
Outside of work, Maddie enjoys going to the gym, socialising with friends, and seeing her family members.
Brutus Bettercar is a valuable member of the Get A Better Car team and supports us with our advertising. When he’s not kicking ass in the ring, he’s kicking the jams with us here at the Get A Better Car head office and helping us get our message out that we are Nottingham and Derby’s fair and bad credit car finance specialists.
Darren is our head of recycling at Get A Better Car. I’m sure it seems strange for a small business like ours to have a head of recycling but Darren has taken this role on voluntarily. He just wants to get the message out there about how invaluable it is for the good of the planet. Some of you may remember Darren from his escapades in the 90s as ‘Captain Planet’, those days are long behind Darren now and he just enjoys the quiet life, as well as helping people to get a better car.
The idea behind Get A Better Car was conceived in 2015 while Duncan was working at First Response Finance (one of our finance partners) and he got the opportunity to go out on dealer visits and speak to other dealers about how they sourced cars, how they advertised their business, and their finance processes. After a couple of years of analysis and testing, he took the leap and left First Response and started out by buying 4 cars that all quickly sold and then quickly got to the point where the stock was able to increase due to the revenue that the sales had been creating.
By the end of 2017, the stock had reached more than 10 cars in stock and he wanted to recruit so that he could focus on developing the advertising and infrastructure. A further year on, they recruited again, and haven’t looked back since. Now stocking between 15 and 25 cars on a regular basis and completely diversifying their advertising, Get A Better Car are a stable and thriving business that sells a large proportion of their cars each month to existing customers and recommendations.
Duncan’s journey into the car finance market started in 2005 when he started working for First Response Finance as an underwriter. This role gave Duncan a comprehensive understanding of credit files, decision making, and an understanding of how car finance companies decide who they can lend money to. After a couple of years in this role, Duncan moved into a brand new department of First Response Finance focussed on near-prime customers offering a lower APR to them compared to those with bad credit.
Then, a management opportunity within the sales team of First Response Finance arose which Duncan took. This gave Duncan the opportunity to work alongside hundreds of car dealers up and down the country and he started to build the understanding and expertise required to eventually open his own dealership in 2017 and he left First Response Finance to do this.
In 2017, when Duncan’s eldest was 1 year old, he opened Get A Better Car, initially with a bank loan, and bought 4 cars and slowly increased that number of the course of the year. By 2018, the bank loan had been paid off and Get A Better Car had over 10 cars in stock which rose to 20 by the end of 2019.
The original idea for a car dealer was to go against the stereotypical view that a lot of people have about car dealerships being pushy, and not offering very good aftersales. Duncan wanted a model whereby customers would receive all the information they needed to make a purchase before they even visited the site, like the monthly payments, deposit amount, car tax payments, and the full vehicle details.
We even managed to get our insurance company to agree to unaccompanied test drives so that customers didn’t feel pressured or sold to while they were testing a car.
The Get A Better Car warranty is far more comprehensive than any other warranty on the market and covers most issues. We have also managed to get insured to provide courtesy cars to customers now, taking the stress of being without a car away from customers that have issues with their car.
Duncan’s key skill is Business Analytics and every 6-months, every piece of information that is recorded about every applicant and every car provides details about the performance of each make, model, fuel type, age, and mileage of car allowing us to make better buying decisions to supply cars that are popular, affordable, and reliable.
Honesty/Clarity of Information
It is our goal to provide all of the information that a customer needs to be able to make a decision on whether to buy a car or not.
If your car has an issue, we will get the problem diagnosed, communicate this to you clearly, and resolve the problem.
Effectiveness
We want our team to be as effective as possible and regularly review our processes to ensure we are only working on things that produce results for us and our customers.
For example, we stopped dealing with a couple of finance companies that don’t approve many people and take a long time to reach a decision so that we can get back to all of our customers more quickly.
Customer Focussed
At Get A Better Car, the customer is at the heart of what we do and we pride ourselves on our reviews, recommendations, and returning customers.
With this in mind, we have developed a very fair, market leading 6-month warranty, and constantly review the data on the cars we buy to make sure that they are of the highest possible standard.
